


Freezing Point

by serseyl



Series: Someone Get These Kids Some Therapy [1]
Category: Mystery Skulls Animated
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grandma Yukino and Mystery are also there, Minor Character Death, OCs as Plot Devices, Pre-Canon, Vivi has ADHD, Vivi-centric, Worldbuilding, based on prompt/idea, mixed race author, mixed race character, prose for days, this is literally just 2.5k of character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:07:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27503530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serseyl/pseuds/serseyl
Summary: Vivi is born in the spring and grows up happy and loud, bright like a star in the chill of the night sky.
Series: Someone Get These Kids Some Therapy [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2010034
Comments: 2
Kudos: 24





	Freezing Point

Vivi’s father, for all his calm demeanor and cool head, panics when her mother announces her pregnancy. Her mother knows why—knows what the Yukino family stands for, what it _means,_ even long before she married in. Her husband, standoffish and proud with a softer center than he knows what to do with, is a _good person,_ and as soon as their meet-cute got serious enough, he told her—just enough to let her know what she was getting into, the kiss of frost chilling her palm in the heat of summer all the proof she needed.

It doesn’t change the fact that Yukino births are notoriously... _difficult_ , even without the additional handicap that is her complete lack of magic.

It’s spring when Vivi is born, in one of the spare bedrooms of the Yukino’s tiny Seattle house. Vivi’s Obaa-san isn’t too old yet, past her prime but spry enough to manage the plane trip, and she’d flown over the ocean scant weeks before the birth. She knows midwifery, and more magic than even her own prodigal son—Vivi’s birth is safer in her hands than any doctor’s.

The longer the labor goes on, the colder the room gets, a pleasant numbness to counteract the heater (cranked high as it could go), and the fire in Vivi’s mother’s veins. Vivi’s father is soothing at his wife’s side, breathing cool air into her sweaty face, and Vivi’s Obaa-san whispers praises and no-nonsense commands under her breath, soothing in a way Vivi’s mother didn’t know she could be. After too long and no time at all, she’s tying the umbilical cord and handing Vivi’s mother her baby.

She’s _beautiful._

She’s small and wrinkly, with damp patches of hair dusting her head, but as Vivi’s mother cradles her baby to her chest there’s a second where she _panics._ Her daughter’s fingers are purple with chill, cold to the touch, and Vivi is still as a corpse—but then Vivi wails, loud and piercing and with everything her little lungs have to give. The room starts to warm, the frost receding from the windows—the worst is over.

Her father smiles and says _Vivi,_ fingers stroking her tiny forehead, and for all the generations of ice flowing through his veins, his world grows infinitely warmer.

~*~

Vivi grows up happy and loud in the way her mother is, bright like a star in the chill of the night sky. When she isn’t babbling to anyone that will listen about whatever she’s learnt that week, she’s turning cartwheels in the grass or climbing the big tree in her backyard, a book stuffed under her arm to read while nestled in the highest branches.

Her mother and father are warm and kind to her—she learns eventually from bring-your-parent-to-school day that her mother is an accountant, working with a big company in downtown Seattle, but for now all she knows is that her father is the one to stay home to play with her and take care of her during the day. He does his own work in his office, door half-open once her mother gets home, and in the evenings he brings some of it to the kitchen table as Vivi plays on the floor, murmuring softly with his wife as he shows her papers and objects Vivi doesn’t know how to describe. Vivi thinks they’re working together, but her mother already _has_ a job, why would she need two?

Maybe her father’s job is just too hard for one person. It _looks_ complicated, the bits she sees, small slips of paper shaped like bookmarks with precise kanji written on them, dusty-looking tomes and newspaper clippings. Sometimes, the two of them just sit at the table, matching calligraphy sets out as they carefully churn out what feels like hundreds of identical weird bookmarks.

Her father goes on the occasional business trip, too, maybe once or twice a month—and something about the way he says it makes it sound almost like a _lie_. Before he leaves, he spends hours in his office, emerging with a heavy-looking backpack, and he kisses the top of Vivi’s head at the doorway and her mother on the lips as a good-bye. He always tells Vivi _be good,_ and her mother _I love you,_ and her mother always says _be safe, come back_ in return. Vivi _hates_ it, hates that his weird trips keep him from home, the house feeling colder despite the fact that it’s always warmer when he’s gone, but she keeps quiet because she knows it won’t change anything. When he leaves, her mother always pulls this clunky machine out of the closet and tunes in to a weird radio station, static with the occasional burst of scratchy dialogue, and she tenses when someone speaks before eventually relaxing. Vivi doesn’t understand, and when she asks, her mother just says _she’s_ _listening to make sure there isn’t any trouble._ Vivi decides she hates the radio, too, because if there’s trouble it’ll be the _radio’s fault,_ and she worries that someday it’ll take her father away longer than the trips already do.

Despite that, he always returns, his bag much lighter and with the occasional scuff or scrape, and he hugs Vivi tighter than he usually does. Her mother looks so relieved when he walks back through the door, and they always spend that evening whispering in the kitchen long after Vivi’s bedtime. Vivi knows they don’t want her to hear whatever it is they’re talking about, but with her door cracked she can just hear their murmurs from up the stairs. The next day, it always feels like nothing’s changed, like her father’s business trip was just a repeating dream she can wake up from. Vivi doesn’t understand, but regardless, it feels nice to have everything back to normal.

~*~

Her father takes her to the park, the one just down the street, and that’s where she meets her two bestest friends for _life._ Danielle and Lucy are as rambunctious as she is, and together they’re thicker than thieves and twice as sneaky, scuffed knees and wide grins the only evidence of their exploits. They attend the same elementary school together, and although they’re not all in the same class every year, they’re _inseparable._ She’s spent more than one afternoon on the floor at Danielle’s house, Mr. Hirsch dabbing gentle brushstrokes on his easel as the girls finger-paint, or curled up at Lucy’s, her Halmeoni telling tall tales by the fire and stuffing them with sweets, bundling Vivi up more and more because she’s _so cold, child, you’ll catch a chill._

When she’s not with them, Vivi reads everything she can get her hands on, even the books she’s not supposed to touch on the shelf in her father’s office. They’re always the most enticing of what Vivi reads—magical in a way she doesn’t understand, and she devours them all even when she doesn’t understand all the words.

When her father finds out, he’s not mad like she thought he’d be. The second he sees her hiding with a strangely-bound book under his desk, dictionary sitting on her knees to translate the more difficult kanji, all the color drains from his face, and the temperature drops until Vivi’s breaths are puffing out in soft clouds of white.

Gently, he takes the book from her and, hands shaking, files it back onto the shelf, telling her _it’s not safe to read these_ and _they’re dangerous_ and _not until you’re older._

Vivi doesn’t understand, but her father makes her pinky-promise, and later that week one of those fancy bookmarks is stuck to the office door and a lock shows up as what she thinks is a deterrent, even though it’s never latched. Her father stops doing work at the kitchen table, and her mother occasionally retreats to his office join him in whatever his work is. It’s the last she sees of those books for a while.

~*~

In the winter of Vivi’s ninth year, her Obaa-san passes away. Vivi is devastated, even though she rarely sees her grandmother—her familiarity is limited to yearly trips to Japan during summer breaks. She remembers running around in the forest that grows around the small, old shrine her family in Japan cares for, her Obaa-san watching carefully as her dog bounds playfully at Vivi’s heels. Vivi feels like she’s lost something, something irreplaceable, but she doesn’t know what.

The rest of her father’s family lives in Japan, and when they fly down for the funeral, it’s somber. At the wake, all Vivi remembers is standing still in a heavy black kimono she hopes she’ll never wear again, a long loop of juzu wrapped around her tiny, trembling fist. After that, it’s a blur of tears and quiet murmurs, her Obaa-san’s body eaten up by flame, the adults picking her bones out of the ash and moving them to the Yukino family grave. Vivi thinks she hears whispers, hushed behind her back as her mother comforts her, words like _branch family_ and _the only one that can_ and _head of the family._

She doesn’t hear much more than that.

When her family flies back to Seattle, her Obaa-san’s dog goes with them.

~*~

Going back to school after the funeral, Vivi is quieter than she’s ever been. She knows her parents worry about her, Lucy and Danielle trying to balance quiet support with attempts to cheer her up. It doesn’t quite work, but the effort is nice, and Vivi has never loved her friends more. Fushigi, like her friends, is sweet, adjusting to their home without a hitch and providing a soft, fuzzy comfort when she needs it most.

Her father tells her that _Fushigi_ can be translated to _Mystery,_ and that he’s a very special dog, that he’ll protect her. Vivi thinks that’s a funny name for a dog, but her Obaa-san was a funny lady, so maybe it makes sense. Either way, it’s nice to have a piece of her grandmother with her, even if she’s passed on.

Vivi regains her cheerful demeanor bit by bit, energy returning with each day that passes, and it’s just after her tenth birthday that her father pulls her aside and says, _I have something to tell you._

She’s nervous as he takes her back into his office, the door opening with the press of his fingertips and a small burst of light that feels a trick of the eyes. Vivi hasn’t stepped foot in the room since she was caught with her father’s books, and she enters cautiously, looking around. The room has changed, messier than she remembers, with talismans hanging on the walls along with other items she remembers seeing around her Obaa-san’s shrine.

Her father takes a book from the shelf, sits her down, and starts speaking. He tells her about the past, words halting like the first frost of winter, about a long, long line of Yukino all dedicated to the protection of humanity, keeping the yokai and other spirits in check. Her father is a serious man, quiet and purposeful, and she almost says something like _that’s a good story_ or _you don’t have to make that up for me_ or _I’m not a kid anymore,_ but then he takes her hand and frost blooms on her fingers, winding down the palm of her hand, and a thousand tiny inconsistencies from her childhood slot together.

He tells her she can’t tell anyone, and in the end, the only thing she can say is, _oh_.

It’s different, after that. She starts spending less time with Lucy and Danielle, her father showing her how to write talismans, the different signs of malignant yokai, how to channel the cold humming beneath her skin. He tells her about the weird things in his office (spiritual artefacts), about the business trips (yokai hunts), and about working with Vivi’s mother at the table (making talismans).

He tells her why he came to America.

Her father pulls out a years-old corkboard, all newspaper clippings and pins and string with a map of North America underneath. He tells her about a demon, a dangerous one, a thousand-year-old yokai that had broken out of its prison at the Yukino shrine and snuck its way across the sea.

He tells her that he’s responsible, as the eldest son (and with Obaa-san’s passing, head of the family), to find it and seal it away, before disaster strikes.

The influx of information feels like almost too much, and her head spins when she eventually settles down for sleep, Fushigi curled up by her legs. It feels heavy, the whiplash that is her entire life seen through a new lens, the weight of what she knows now.

Even with all that, she knows he still hasn’t told her everything.

~*~

She and Lucy and Danielle have a falling out, and Vivi cries her eyes out. She can’t tell them, can’t share this with them like she does everything else, and they tell her she can start being their friend again when she stops being a _liar._

Her mother comforts her, even though she doesn’t have a solution, and distracts her with stories from her youth, moving to Seattle for school and meeting her father, and how he hid this from her, too. Vivi knows it isn’t the same.

Vivi works on making talismans with her mother (she always had the steadier hand), and creating ice with her father (another branch in a tree that only blossoms in winter), and listens to their stories from yokai hunts together, before Vivi was born. She pushes herself hard, filling the free time she would have spent with her friends with studying, with _training,_ and her father tells her that Vivi’s Obaa-san called him a prodigy, and would have called Vivi one, too.

Fushigi huffs as he lays at her feet, and when she works too long into the night, he whines until she goes to sleep. Eventually, her father signs her up for baseball, the sport she’d shrugged the least at, just to get her out of the house because she _needs to talk to kids her own age._ She loves it more than she feels she has any right to.

It doesn’t make everything _better,_ but it helps.

~*~

It’s winter again and Vivi is thirteen, and her father goes on the longest business trip he’s ever been on. He tells her _this might be it_ as he packs more than he’s ever taken with him before, and leaves her and her mother and Fushigi behind. He tells Vivi _he’s_ _proud of her,_ tells her mother _he loves her,_ and tells Fushigi to _protect them._ It feels weird, but he’s done weirder. Vivi can’t help but worry.

He calls once every three days like clockwork, and when he checks in he tells them about how the thing he’s chasing is fast, moving quicker than he can track it, how what he thought would be a quick trip to Oregon has pulled him through Nevada and Arizona, still running east.

He sends them his last known coordinates, so they can track him on the map in his office.

Then, he stops checking in completely.

Her mother gets one last set of coordinates before his check-in date, texted to her flip phone, and when he doesn’t call and won’t answer over the next two days she panics. She’s a whirlwind of activity, calling in from work, booking a plane ticket, packing some of what’s left in her husband’s office. She stashes two weeks worth of frozen meals in the freezer, and in a repeat that leaves Vivi with a sick feeling in her bones, frost curling on the windows with her anxiety, tells Fushigi to _protect her._ Then, she turns to Vivi and and says _stay calm,_ that _she_ _loves her,_ that _she’ll_ _be back soon._

She’s halfway out the door, harried and frantic, when she tells Vivi to _stay by the home phone,_ to _call her if there’s an emergency._ She tells Vivi that _she’ll_ _call when she finds her father._

~*~

The next phone call Vivi gets is from the police.

**Author's Note:**

> This is hopefully part one of a series, based on the second idea in a post by Sagartolen/picat-1000 which can be found at https://pi-cat000.tumblr.com/post/626045429416607744/msa-au-idea-dad-mystery-au-vivis-parents-die-or 
> 
> Some notes, because there were a lot of details I wanted to include, but at some point, you just gotta call it quits:
> 
> Mr. and Mrs. Yukino, aka Vivi's mother and father, don't have canon names. It made it kind of complicated to refer to them, but I didn't really want to give them names, and besides, this is mostly from Vivi's point of view--she wouldn't call them by name.
> 
> I wish I’d conveyed it more clearly, but Vivi grew up in a mixed race household with a Japanese father and a white mother. During their relationship and throughout Vivi’s life, her mother worked hard to learn Japanese and other things about her husband’s family’s customs, and Vivi’s father did the same--it ends up being a very balanced bilingual household. While I consider this the “ideal” for mixed race households, there are many that aren’t like this, such as my own (no I’m not writing wish fulfillment what are you talking about)
> 
> The Yukino family is located in Seattle because it's one of the main places people immigrating from Asia tend to end up, due to it being a coastal city on the Pacific Rim. It wasn’t important, but they live in Queen Anne, a district of Seattle full of quaint little houses with lush gardens, narrow roads, and steep hills. It’s a very white portion of Seattle and it’s ridiculously expensive to own a house there--good thing Vivi’s father has Yukino money to rely on.
> 
> Are there monsters etc. that aren't Yokai in America? I mean probably. Do I really care about them, given that this is written from the perspective of monster hunters that only care about Yokai? Not really.
> 
> I referred to Vivi’s mother and father as such for consistency, but Vivi switches between referring to them in English or Japanese based on what language she’s speaking for ease of access since she lives in a primarily English-speaking neighborhood. Grandma Yukino is always referred to as Obaa-san (unless I'm using grandmother as a descriptor), because why would Vivi refer to her any other way? 
> 
> Vivi’s mother uses a ham radio, which is basically radio anyone can broadcast with as long as they have the equipment--here, it functions kind of like a long-range walkie-talkie. I’d imagine there’s a monster-hunting frequency that varies based on location that keeps the people who know the right channels up-to-date on relevant info. 
> 
> Vivi’s childhood friends are Danielle Hirsch and Lucy (Ha-Eun) Park, who are somewhat based off of my own childhood friends. According to the internet, Ha-Eun can be translated along the lines of “kind summer,” which I chose because it’s the opposite of the Yukino’s ice theme. Danielle’s name was chosen more on a whim, but (fun fact) her family is Jewish.
> 
> According to the internet Halmeoni is Grandmother, but if anyone knows better, _please_ speak up.
> 
> The Yukino family all have ice powers, passed down generation by generation--and I’m gonna be playing fast and loose with the whole magic thing.
> 
> The Yukino family is Buddhist because in the only art of Grandma Yukino, she’s holding a shakujo, which is a staff traditionally carried by Buddhist monks.
> 
> The Yukino family is one of many major families in the Yokai hunting business, and they command a lot of respect--each family has its own little “district” of turf they’re responsible for. I don’t know enough about Japan to know what prefecture they’d located in, but it's one with a lot of mountains and snow.
> 
> After Grandma Yukino dies, Vivi’s father becomes the head of the family. While normally this would mean he’s responsible for the Yukino shrine, estate, and administrative things RE Yokai hunting for his “district,” he’s still in the middle of an important mission that “only he can do.” The "branch family," aka cousins etc. are all there to upkeep the Yukino business in his stead. His Aunt who fills the position of head of the family while he's away ends up actually becoming head of the family once he dies. She's ambitious, and likes being head of the family, but she didn't want it like this.
> 
> Regarding “Fushigi:” look, I know the dog’s name is Mystery, but just it feels off to me that the Japanese Kitsune that lives with the Japanese family in Japan would be referred to in English. Technically (according to the internet) the best translation for Mystery is Shinpi, but I, uh. Hated how that sounded. Fushigi means along the lines of strange/unexpected/mystery and sounds better to my ear, so I went with that.
> 
> Apologies if I got anything glaringly wrong with the funeral, I've attended Buddhist funerals but not Japanese ones. Cursory internet search says they're pretty different from what I'm used to.
> 
> The baseball will be relevant later.


End file.
